Making Plans for Nigel

Recently, I was at a meeting discussing speakers for a national housing event. Something which struck a number of us on the call was that the proposed list was almost exclusively Labour figures from national, local, and regional government. When asked about opposition voices from other parties, we were told that someone had been approached from the Lib Dems.

The social housing sector is comfortable talking to centre left, centre and centre right politicians. They hold the views which reflect those of the people who work at a senior level in organisations and the lobby groups. The national bodies were often careful to ensure that they had some representation from the two major parties in their ranks.

But where is Reform? While some people in the sector would be disgusted to have reform speakers at their events, perhaps even boycotting them. We must be realistic, Reform have moved from being purely a party of protest to one which now runs two regional authorities and ten councils, including some housing authorities. I have seen graphs and pie charts which question the focus on the party as they are still behind the Green Party in the number of council seats, ignoring that Reform could not win seats which were not up this time.

I also question the sector’s stance on listening to the voice of the customer. We are keen to listen to that voice when its values accord with our own: liberal, inclusive and diverse but we also have to accept that as with BREXIT, we are in a different place to significant numbers of our customers who don’t hold our world view and have turned to Reform to express their attitudes. The elephant in the room is that some of our tenants feel threatened by the changing country, globalisation and have views which would not make it through an EDI training session.

I would be very worried about my commissioned services if I were in one of the areas won by the party. Take supported housing, which was the focus of my blog last month. The National Housing Federation is running a campaign to protect the sector. One of the threats is a loss of local Government funding. Many of these services are supported as part of adult social care budgets held at a county level and were already having their funding called into question.

We all know that Reform is obsessed with immigration and asylum. While supported housing does not house asylum seekers, they have ‘no resource to public funds’ we do have homeless refugees in our projects. Will Reform DOGE defund these projects or seek to change the profile of those helped? Where they are running housing authorities will they seek to change allocation policies? Are they a party of Nimbys or one of growth?

Currently we know very little about their intentions for our sector.